This workshop is the second one after the success of the first ATGSE2007 in Nagoya, Japan.
It will explore approaches to collecting, analyzing, and reporting software engineering metrics in projects that may be globally distributed, involve multiple offshore companies, and use combinations of open source and proprietary software components. While many companies and academic software engineering researchers have explored ways to collect and analyze empirical software metrics within a company, the reality of modern software development involves outsourcing, offshore development, and integration from multiple sources. Unfortunately, corporate concerns often limit the availability and use of empirical data outside the project or company, which can make providing accountability and traceability for such projects difficult. This workshop will examine the status of efforts to collect and report software engineering metrics in various Asian-Pacific countries, and some possible approaches to extending the availability and use of this information to suit the global outsourced software engineering world.

The workshop will address several topics:

Status of empirical software engineering efforts in various Asian-Pacific areas

Software development environments, including global outsourcing and use of components from multiple vendors

Empirical data collection methods and specifications

Tools for collection and analysis of empirical data

Visualization of empirical data and software engineering processes

Possible approaches to accountability and traceability for offshore development based on software engineering metrics

Social and economic impacts of accountability and traceability in offshore development

Research and collaboration possibilities to explore concepts of accountability and traceability in offshore development

The key result of the workshop will be a report mapping the status of empirical software engineering efforts in the Asian-Pacific areas and possible approaches to accountability and traceability for offshore development. The report will also list necessary research areas dealing with this.

This workshop has implications for software maintenance and evolution, global software development outsourcing, software metrics and measurement, empirical software engineering, software process improvement, quality management, and testing, verification and validation among other topics of interest to the APSEC 2008 community. As embedded, ubiquitous software becomes an increasingly important part of our lives, effective accountability and traceability will become necessary. This workshop will begin to build the necessary foundations for this work.

The workshop will be one full day, with 20-30 attendees including invited and open ones. The workshop will consist of a few invited speaker presentations and 5-10 selected position paper presentations. All papers should be written in the IEEE conference format (http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/cscps/cps/cps_forms.html)

The proceeding of the workshop will be published as a report of the laboratory of computer science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. It will be distributed to the workshop participants.